Last Night Out: Dinner at Brutto, San Francisco
The last night of the trip we made it count. Brutto is one of those restaurants you keep hearing about from people who live in Panama City — the kind of place locals are slightly possessive of, where the food is inventive without being pretentious about it. It sits on the upper floors of PH Midtown in the San Francisco neighborhood, and by the time we got there the evening was fully dark and the city was doing its thing below.
We started with cocktails. The menu here is genuinely interesting — things that sound simple on paper but arrive with a detail or two that changes the whole thing. Stephen got a gin highball with fresh lemon, ice-cold and clean. The cocktail program leans into quality ingredients and restraint rather than novelty, which is the right call. We sat with them for a while before ordering food, the kind of evening pacing that only works when you're not in a hurry to be anywhere else.
The menu at Brutto is hard to categorize, which is the point. Sushi sits next to risotto, buns next to grilled meats — it's an avant-garde proposal that somehow doesn't feel scattered. Everything is handled with precision. We worked through several dishes: tender mains that kept us at the table longer than planned, small bites that made us wish we'd ordered doubles. The room itself is modern and stylish, low lighting, the kind of space that feels like it was designed for a long dinner rather than a quick one.
Then dessert arrived. A chocolate-dipped ice cream bar on a stick — Brutto’s take on a paleta, dark chocolate shell with a Nutella-laced interior, served on a blue and white geometric plate with crushed chocolate crumble scattered around it. It looked almost too good to start and then disappeared embarrassingly fast. One of those desserts that is so obviously the right thing to order that you wonder why you bothered deliberating.
Brutto was the right way to end the trip. After a week of eating across every neighborhood in Panama City — Casco Viejo, El Cangrejo, Marbella, Calle Uruguay — we finished in San Francisco with a restaurant that reminded us why this city has become one of the better food destinations in Latin America. If you go, let the evening run long. It earns it.
